Excerpt from Research Project Food Porn in Films

What is Food Porn?

​

The term “food porn” within the culinary and media world can be traced approximately from the 1970s. Throughout my research there were several names associated to this term that had been documented from that decade. Most of them are male and female writers who agreed on the fact that food porn is a visual experience that relates to the senses of sight and hearing. According to the Oxford Dictionary, food porn is an informal term that refers to “images that portray food in a very appetizing or aesthetically appealing way” (1). Michael Jacobson, the co-founder of the Center for Science in the Public Interest, claims that he “coined the term to connote a food that was so sensationally out of bounds of what a food should be that it deserved to be considered pornographic”(2). I identified myself with Amanda Simpson, the creator of the site Food Porn Daily. She offers a more informal and straight-forward approach to the food porn term by saying that it is “anything that makes me drool” (3). 

​

Underneath the sexy, ornate, and seductive images lie a series of subgenres, “in which food production, preparation, service, and/or consumption play an operative and memorable role in the development of character, structure, or theme” (4). The sub-genres under discussion in this essay will represent the cultural, sexual, psychological, and socio-economic aspects of some of the characters in the films as well as the realities of the society they live in.